Edgelands

Today I attended and spoke at the Edgelands conference organised by the lovely Andy Field and Hannah Nicklin. I spoke about archives, silos, and open data, with particular reference to GeoCities, the Edinburgh Fringe, and the Birmingham Rep archive on the AHDS – or rather, only on Theatricalia (which now also has all the Fringe productions from 2010 and 2008). There are audio recordings of the talks on AudioBoo, and I was being filmed (eek) so I guess that’ll be appearing somewhere at some point.

Rachel Coldicutt spoke before me, and she’s written up her talk and subsequent discussion. I felt my provocation wasn’t that provocative, but as people don’t seem to know or learn from what has happened, it’s always worth banging the drum for innovation that doesn’t have to be particularly innovative 🙂 My subsequent discussion ranged from personal backups to curation and is all this potential process getting in the way. I guess the overarching point I’d like remembered is that it’s about informed decision making, knowing the risks and rewards for e.g. putting your video on YouTube, and thinking about the future, and how open data and collaboration can potentially help.

I was rather nervous beforehand, as it’s a very different audience to one I’d be more used to, but I think it went well overall – my favourite response was the following, which is basically all I could ask for:

Everyone else’s talks, or provocations, were interesting and indeed thought provoking, it was certainly good to spend time thinking about things far removed from where I normally am, and to meet some new people or finally meet people in person.

Today’s show count is pretty tricky, but as part of the day I definitely saw two excellent performances, by Deborah Pearson and Hitch by Kieran Hurley, and I’m going to count the conference itself as one event.